Archives

Follow us on Twitter

Earlier this year, the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center teamed up to write a letter.

Addressed to the editorial office at the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), the letter, parts of which have been published in a retraction notice, contained information concerning two papers on genetic risk factors for a type of kidney cancer and a type of uterine cancer, respectively, published in different AACR journals over a decade ago by researchers affiliated with the institutions.

The papers had been at the center of research misconduct investigations at both UCSF and the VA and the investigations came to the conclusion that both papers contained:

fabrication or falsification of data that constitutes Research Misconduct.

The retraction notice — a more thorough one than we usually see — often quotes the joint letter verbatim, adding that:

The two articles had some figures with the same panels used for both papers despite being experiments from two different cancers. The figures also have some panels repeated from and identical to an earlier paper studying a third type of cancer.

We haven’t been able to determine exactly when the UCSF and VA investigations started. We requested a copy of the letter sent to AACR, but Terri O’Lonergan, UCSF assistant vice chancellor and chief ethics and compliance officer, told us she would first have to determine whether it was a public document and, even if it were, that she would only release it with the agreement of the VA.

There is, however, a four-year-old thread on PubPeer, suggesting that multiple figures in each of the two papers contain suspiciously similar gel bands. Primarily, the initial PubPeer commenter noted that bands from figure 1B in each paper appeared to be the same.

The UCSF and VA investigations confirmed that those figures 1B were similar and that they indicated research misconduct. The letter, as quoted in the retraction notice, said:

The Investigation Committee reviewed in detail the analytic methods and findings of the Inquiry Committee. It unanimously agreed that there were numerous similarities between the figures in question, including the location and shape of streak and spot artifacts, as well as band morphologies were noted. This was concluded by the Committee to support the allegation of data falsification or fabrication and research misconduct.

The UCSF/VA letter also said that several images appeared to originate in third paper, “Polymorphisms of the CYP1B1 gene have higher risk for prostate cancer,” published in August 2002 in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. That paper has been cited 56 times.

While the UCSF/VA letter unequivocally said that research misconduct had taken place, it did not specifically ask for the two papers to be retracted. Instead, UCSF and the VA left the final decision up to ACCR, saying that they:

recommend that both Clinical Cancer Research and Cancer Research assess these articles for correction or retraction.

As far as we can tell, Cancer Research has not made any moves to correct or retract the 2003 paper. The journal hasn’t yet responded to our request for comment on the future of that paper.

Update, 18:41 UTC time, September 15, 2017: The other paper has been retracted. You can read the notice here.

How can they “recommend” the “correction or retraction”?!
This is in other words saying that they do accept data manipulation and
do not care about the scientific record.
They should be clear and DEMAND RETRACTION ASAP.

You do so much hard work to find out all the misconduct and scientific corruption but I doubt that it makes much dent into the careers of the so called scientists who are responsible for such acts. They will still publish more papers, retain their positions as Professors, Directors and get more money from the NIH

“I doubt that it makes much dent into the careers of the so called scientists who are responsible for such acts. They will still publish more papers, retain their positions as Professors, Directors and get more money from the NIH”

“The authors report that there is a mistake in the representative picture of Fig. 4D (top row: PC3-miR1260b inh-0h) in the original version. The correct version of Fig. 4 with the original pictures for both PC3 miR-NC inh-0h and PC3-miR1260b inh-0h are provided below.”

hello
You do so much hard work to find out all the misconduct and scientific corruption but I doubt that it makes much dent into the careers of the so called scientists who are responsible for such acts.